


Beside You

by embroiderama



Series: The Spellbound Future [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: 1970s, F/M, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-19
Updated: 2010-01-19
Packaged: 2017-10-06 11:36:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embroiderama/pseuds/embroiderama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That whole first summer, John barely touched her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beside You

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [](http://elanurel.livejournal.com/profile)[**elanurel**](http://elanurel.livejournal.com/) for the beta. This is a follow-up to [Aching to Hold](http://embroiderama.livejournal.com/82466.html).

That whole first summer, John barely touched her. By August, they were spending hours together, long evenings sitting in the yard in front of his mother's house, blades of grass poking into her legs where her shorts rode up, or on the glider on Mary's front porch. They'd sit there through summer storms, the air going cool around them, droplets of blown-in rain stinging against her sunburn. The most he would do was stretch his arm out on the back of the glider, a long, firm warmth against her shoulders.

Her dad had his eye on them; that might have had something to do with it. But he kissed her on the first of September, the night before her parents drove her up to college three hours away. Pressed her against the side of the house with his hands around her upper arms holding her close as his shaved-smooth cheek rubbed against hers, his strong, full lips pressing into hers. His calloused fingers scraped against her skin, and she wrapped her arms around his back to pull herself in closer against the firm muscles of his chest.

The back of his t-shirt, soft and worn and just a little damp from sweat, bunched up between her fingers and rode up out of his waistband until she could feel his skin there, the line of his backbone, the muscles over his ribs. The rhythm of his breath moved against her hands as he panted against her face, warm air gusting over her cheek, her neck, before he kissed her again, deeper this time.

As his tongue slipped into her mouth, so much softer and more vulnerable feeling than any other part of him she'd felt before, she slid her hands farther up his back and felt a strange jagged line right across his spine. It was only as wide as two of her fingers, but it felt rounded and raised, thick as a piece of yarn. "Wha--," she started to ask, pulling away from his lips just far enough to gasp the question, but he shook his head to silence her.

"Shhh," he whispered, hissing breath cool against her ear.

~~~

John told her nearly a year later. They'd gone all the way for the first time, and she was still holding onto him. She brushed her fingers over that raised ridge on his back, and he began to speak quiet words against her neck. He told her about shrapnel, how it was like knives thrown by an explosion, how he would have been paralyzed, maybe killed, if it weren't for the man who stood in front of him. How the other man's ribs and lungs and heart had slowed down the shrapnel enough that the tiny slice of metal that found John's back only cut through his clothes and his skin, not his spine.

He shook in her arms, and Mary pressed her hand flat against his scar, hard like it was still bleeding. She looked at the wallpaper of her bedroom, white with vines and tiny pink roses, and tried to imagine all that blood. But the slick warmth pooled on John's skin was only sweat, and she could feel his heart beating behind his ribs, just as steady as her own.


End file.
